When the Prince of Darkness crawled out of his cage, he was for a few moments blinded by daylight. Normally he came out only during the night, but every now and then, when he was in the right mood, he also appeared to face the light of the day.

The few moments while he was blinded could have been used by brave and lion-hearted people to wrestle away the prince’s elder wand and his magic ring. While the elder wand gave the prince power to fend off even the most forceful assault, the magic ring was even more important because its loss would have meant the instant metamorphosis of the prince into a little grey toad.

Many ages ago a goddess, annoyed by the prince’s machinations and intrigues, did cast a spell on him which would have transformed the prince into a toad, but the spell didn’t work because he was protected by his magic ring. The goddess would have probably succeeded if she had only tried a little bit harder and used all her supreme powers, but soon after her unsuccessful attempt to reign in the Prince of Darkness she retreated from this world, apparently tired of human folly and stupidity.

So the prince, unrestrained and unchallenged, lived on in his cage, which was in fact a huge subterranean castle, bigger than the biggest luxury doomsday bunkers of the worlds top billionaires, and he came out whenever he felt bored or itchy to do mischief. He always easily found collaborators for his evil schemes who under his supervision started wars and committed unimaginable atrocities. The Roman emperors Nero and Caligula, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Charlemagne, King Leopold II, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin were among his many conspirators, and he was very proud of what they had achieved with his help.

The Prince of Darkness epitomized every psychopathic trait one can think off, for example: Lack of empathy, dishonesty, deviousness, turpitude, wickedness, vice, and pervertedness. But the Prince of Darkness was also clever, and he was aware that his short period of disorientation and blinding by daylight was a vulnerability. He consequently one day developed a plan to dim sunlight down to a level which he was comfortable with.

There are quite a few humans who just like the prince try to avoid daylight and rather operate clandestinely under the cover of darkness. They are mostly political leaders, generals, bankers, and other criminals. They often like to wear dark sunglasses, this is one of the features by which one can identify them.

The prince got on the phone to call the most eminent leaders of the evil empire. He had worked with them already on many projects, mainly in the Middle East and Latin America, and they knew each other well. One could say, they had a good working climate, which is not surprising, because they were, after all, on the same wavelength.

They sat together in the biggest conference room of his underground castle and he presented his plan. There was not much persuasion or convincing necessary, they all liked his plan and there were only minor differences about some details.

The scheme started with an attack against one of the few nations which were still independent and not absorbed into the evil empire. This by itself was nothing extraordinary because such attacks happened all the time. The new twist was that the imperial air force in the initial phase of the assault would drop special bombs which were generating lot of smoke and the clouds of black smoke would cover the sun and create nearly complete darkness even at the brightest day.

The imperial forces could cope with such conditions, they had night vision hardware (thermal imaging devices and infrared searchlights) mounted on every combat vehicle, they had battlefield surveillance radar, they had laser sights / designators, and all soldiers were equipped with night vision goggles.

This technological advantage would allow the imperial forces to take over all crucial positions and command posts without much enemy resistance and without losses. The daytime darkness would also deal a devastating blow to the enemies economy, agriculture, and social fabric. Under these conditions it would be easy to install a puppet government and convert the country to another sweatshop vassal state.

The example of this successful conquest would also show any other nation on earth, that resistance was futile, and create a condition of total world dominance, or “full spectrum dominance.” Full spectrum dominance was a goal the evil empire had pursued all the time, but it now was in reach, it was a realistic objective, and it could be achieved in a short time.

After two month of preparation a war against one of the smaller countries was started and the plan worked perfectly. It also worked against a second country, but the two most powerful nations still didn’t surrender. Their informants were placed in the highest ranks of the imperial military, and they knew since long about the smoke bombs and the planned warfare in darkness. They had developed their own smoke generating warheads and equipped many intercontinental missiles with them. They also had worked together to outfit their armies with infrared, radar, and laser devices so that they were able to resist an invasion.

One day a barrage of missiles was launched against the imperial heartland and it completely surprised the empire. In an escalating exchange the imperial forces dropped every smoke bomb they had onto the enemy while every missile equipped with a smoke warhead was sent towards the empire’s territory.

This was still not a nuclear war, but it was bad enough. A ceasefire was negotiated, but it was too late to avert a global catastrophe, as clouds of black smoke now covered most of the planet and temperatures dropped more than 10 degrees. Crops withered and there were no harvests. Northern areas were blanketed in snow and ice. The darkness impeded industrial activity, social structures unraveled, and countries disintegrated into thiefdoms of local warlords.

There was famine all around the world and a complete breakdown of institutions on all levels. Millions of people starved to death, froze to death, or were killed by criminal gangs and ransacking militias. Millions died from pandemics which quickly spread. In only two decades the human population dropped to two billion, with wide regions being completely empty of any human life.

Fortunately level-headed technicians and operators had safely shot down all nuclear power plants, refineries, and chemical plants, but some spent nuclear fuel pools nonetheless overheated and burning nuclear fuel contaminated large areas, resulting in nuclear disaster exclusion zones the size of whole countries. Plants and animals were adapting to the increased radioactivity, colonizing these territories again, undisturbed by human activity.

The Prince of Darkness had watched the carnage with growing excitement. He was delighted, elated, exalted, ecstatic, blissful. Not even in his wildest dreams he had foreseen this outcome. He stood there in front of his cage and with all grandeur and gravitas he could muster he slowly said: “I’m proud, I’m very proud of myself!”

What the prince didn’t realize was, that, undetected by state surveillance, insurgency groups had formed. They were undetected and unhindered because as there was no state anymore, there was also no state surveillance and there was also no federal or state police to take them out. There were local police forces guarding the few intact communities, but they mostly were identical with the insurgency movements.

One of these groups had discovered the prince’s cave and they were watching it around the clock. They also realized that on the few days where the sun was strong enough to pierce through the cloudage which was still covering most of the planet, the prince was for a short moment incapacitated by sunlight.

The strongest and most adroit of them built cleverly camouflaged positions beside the caves entrance and manned them around the clock on all days where there was a chance of sunlight.

And one day, as the prince appeared from the cage and was for a few moments blinded and disoriented by a ray of sunlight they attacked him, and they wrestled the elder wand from his hand and pulled the magic ring from his finger.

The prince was completely surprised, he only said “No!” and then a second time “No!” But that was the last word he said as he began to shrink and after a few seconds had become a little grey toad.

The members of the assault group were a bit unsure what to do with the toad, but as the spell was fulfilled and the toad never would morph into a prince again they just stepped back to let the toad hop away in search of a creek or lake or puddle.

The toad had retained all the memories of its former life, but the world looks different through the eyes of a toad and slowly the former prince realized the severity of his crimes. As he was a little toad now he could not do anything to alleviate, ease, and reduce the pain and suffering he had caused. Even as a powerful prince he would not have been able to do that.

Is there redemption, absolution, and forgiveness possible in the face of mass murder, crimes against humanity, and genocide?

Just like the prince the toad was not aging and it was strong and clever. Toads are an endangered species and they are rare, but after a long and excruciating search the prince-toad found a small colony of fellow toads and it got busy reproducing in order to help the species survive. Soon the nearby creeks and ponds were filled with tadpoles and they grew to little toadlets.

The prince-toad was always around to guide and protect the toadlets and as it watched them hopping or swimming it quaked with all grandeur and gravitas it could muster: “I’m proud, I’m very proud of myself!”